Love and Other Drugs

Director: Edward Zwick
Writers: Edward Zwick, Charles Randolph, Marshall Herskovitz
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway
Release Date: November 24, 2010
Length: 1 hour 52 minutes

Anne Hathaway and Jake Gylenhaal. Two young talented beautiful people in Hollywood playing love interests in a film called “Love and Other Drugs”. If that doesn’t scream chick flick to you, I don’t know what would. That certainly was my first impression from hearing about this movie. However, when I watched the trailer and even the beginning of the film, I started to think this might actually be a legitimately good movie. The first thing that changed my mind was the original story that “Chick Flicks” really never have. Ladies man Jamie Randall is a pharmaceutical salesman in 1996 for the drug Zoloft just before the discovery of Viagra. At one of his client’s office, he meets patient Maggie Murdock who has stage 1 Parkinson’s disease. After the two go for coffee, they end up in bed with each other within the hour. Their sexual non-relationship continues as neither of them want a boyfriend/girlfriend and just want to enjoy sex. Soon, Jamie develops strong feelings for Maggie which she at first rejects before they begin a serious relationship. All is well until Maggie’s Parkinson’s disease and Jamie’s promiscuous status starts to get in the way of this kind of real relationship neither of them has been in before. The second thing to change my mind about this being a girly kind of movie was the constant graphic sex scenes and nudity. The amount of it did not affect the movie in a good or bad way at all. The filmmakers could have maybe cut down on the amount of times Hathway shows her breasts but the sex scenes are necessary in that they define the first half of the movie. It is important to know that they have a strictly sexual affair and not at all a romantic relationship. It’s hard to put this movie under the title of romantic comedy because it’s not ridiculously funny and not entirely romantic until midway through. Both Hathaway and Gylenhaal’s characters are pretty morbid existential people that don’t see a point in relationships or love. When this trait is subtly played out in scenes, it is very believable but sometimes, it was much too forced and came off as pretentious and unnecessary. It also didn’t help the movie when one character would say “you’re more messed up than me” as opposed to letting the audience figure it out on their own. At first, it’s refreshing to see two characters that are both on the same page of moroseness instead one of them being a hopeless romantic and the other not believing in love. After a while though, you begin to get sick of their repetitive melancholic nature. However, both actors carried the movie very well. Hathaway and Gylenhaal shared a completely natural chemistry on screen and played off each other beautifully. Both being talented academy award nominated actors, their performances almost made this a great movie. My feelings of this movie being a chick flick or not went on a bit of an up-and-down rollercoaster. The movie had an original story, clever dialogue and believability until 3 quarters of the way through. It was almost like they hired a different screenwriter at this point in the film because used clichés were coming in at every turn from now on. I was able to accurately predict the ending, something I didn’t expect to do when I was watching the beginning of the film. Cheesiness and clichés don’t usually stop me from enjoying a movie however the unexpected use of them at the end was very annoying. When a film is fantastic for only 75% of it, you know that it had the potential to be great all the way through. Love And Other Drugs is not your typical chick flick, just a disappointing one.